Lecture-recital at Jacksonville University

While science, technology, and innovative communication media enrich our growing globalized world, contrasts between ethnicities and cultural identities still provoke social tensions. Can music play a positive role in this scenario? Music as a language is capable of interpreting the evolution of cultural identities and functioning as an intermediary in the negotiation between ethnicities. This research aims to provide evidence that Ballard’s Four American Indian Piano Preludes and Ginastera’s Piano Sonata no. 2 op. 53 work in this sense by fusing Native-American musical elements with compositional techniques belonging to European musical artistry. In his Piano Sonata no.2 (1981), Alberto Ginastera treated indigenous music as one of the fundamental symbols of Argentine culture, as compared to the Gauchesco one. These two symbols are opposed, juxtaposed, fused in atonal textures, and ultimately gathered together as in the dream of a unified, big Latin American Nation. Louis Ballard, as a Quapaw-Cherokee composer with…